Daily Archives: Nov 20, 2012

There are only ten days left now until Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, has to decide whether to approve one of the country’s most controversial pieces of legislation – the oil and gas royalties bill.

If Venezuela’s finance minister Jorge Giordani is to be taken at his word, the OPEC country has entered a “new phase” of “stable and sustainable” growth.

Certainly, the economy’s 5.2 per cent growth in the third quarter announced by the government on Tuesday is not to be sniffed at, but there is a growing chorus of voices that suggest that Giordani’s projection of 6 per cent GDP growth for 2013 is at the very least optimistic. Read more

Mexico’s trust-busters are sometimes regarded as a rather toothless bunch. The concentration of markets as disparate as beer, television and telephony appears to prove the thesis. But the problem often lies not with the trust-busters – officially known as the Federal Competition Commission – but with a legal system that makes prevarication into a fine art.

Cristina Fernández, Argentina’s president, faced her first general strike on Tuesday. She must be getting used to protests by now, after big anti-government rallies on November 8 (dubbed 8N) and September 13 (13S).

While previous protests were the middle classes who took to the streets, this time it was workers, the bedrock of the ruling Peronist movement. For a president who is flattered by comparisons with Evita, the darling of the working-class in late 1940s and early 1950s Argentina, it must have been a painful sight. Read more

Frothy consumer spending has helped insulate Russia against the external headwinds that are cramping economic growth. But as a three-month slowdown in retail sales growth deepens, it appears that even stoic Russian shoppers are beginning to feel the pinch. Read more

A cautious move, or a nervous one? Turkey’s central bank cut its overnight lending rate from 9.5 per cent a year to 9 per cent on Tuesday while keeping its policy rate (the one-week repo) and its overnight borrowing rate unchanged at 5.75 per cent and 5 per cent, respectively.

As Capital Economics noted, in recent months the bank has provided liquidity exclusively at the policy rate, so Tuesday’s cut is a signal rather than a practical move. But what does it tell us? Read more

African sovereign debt has quadrupled in the last decade, but compared to other regions still has a long way to go. As Eleanor Whitehead of This is Africa explains to Rob Minto of beyondbrics, investor appetite for African bonds is growing – so which countries are next?

Egypt has finally reached a long-awaited preliminary agreement with the International Monetary Fund for a $4.8bn loan.

The deal, made public on Tuesday, is designed to help Cairo reinforce its finances, stabilise its reserves, and restore investor confidence. But the announcement leaves some key details unclear, notably the fate of the currency, widely seen as overvalued. Read more

The phrases “south Balkan nation” and “ease of doing business” are mutually exclusive in the minds of many western business leaders. But in case you hadn’t noticed, Macedonia, the most southerly of the former Yugoslavia successor states, came in at number 23 in the latest World Bank Doing Business rankings.

Unsurprisingly, it was something Nikola Gruevski, Macedonia’s prime minister (pictured), was keen to emphasise during an official visit Budapest. Read more

Croatia’s efforts to attack corruption in advance of its imminent accession into the EU have claimed the scalp of former prime minister Ivo Sanader, who on Tuesday was found guilty of taking bribes and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The judgement could help Zagreb persuade Brussels that it is serious about cleaning up public life. But it could create difficulties with two EU members, Austria and Hungary, as the companies which allegedly bribed Sanader were the Austrian-controlled Bank Hypo-Alpe-Adria and the Hungarian oil giant MOL. Read more

As the seven men who will lead China for the next five years walked out onto the stage of the Great Hall of the People last Thursday, stock market traders with a sense for politics swung into action.

Less than two hours after Zhang Gaoli, the new seventh-ranked member of the Communist Party of China’s Politburo Standing Committee, stood in front of the popping of flash bulbs, Hong Kong-listed shares of Xinyi Glass had leapt more than six per cent. Read more

With Ukraine’s currency plunging to a three-year low of 8.27 hryvnia to the dollar, and central bank reserves dwindling, the administration of President Viktor Yanukovich has turned to hardball tactics to preserve stability.

A series of new currency market rules adopted early this week aim to force impoverished citizens and oligarch-owned exporters into coughing up their hard currency cash. Read more

On the face of it seems an unlikely question. But in the the aftermath of a bungled spectrum auction, and with India’s telecoms operators facing what could be their weakest quarterly revenue performance in three years, might the worst actually be over for the beleaguered sector?

Smartphone maker HTC has been struggling recently to compete against Samsung and Apple, leaving many in the market wondering what strategy the Taiwanese company has for turning itself around.

One thing HTC says it’s not going to do: Shake up top management. In fact, even suggesting tension among executives could land you in court for defamation, as a local magazine in Taiwan has just discovered. Read more

It’s not often that the cities of Kuala Lumpur and Ottawa are mentioned in the same sentence. Yet the Malaysian and Canadian capitals, respectively, are at the centre of an intriguing dilemma for emerging market watchers.